late: Anonymous had posted the tran-
script of Richmond and Mays's proba-
ble-cause hearing, and it, too, had ne-
glected to redact her name.
Ma'lik Richmond and Trent Mays
were adjudicated delinquent---
the equivalent of a guilty verdict---on
March 17th. Richmond was sentenced
to a year in juvenile detention; Mays,
convicted of both rape and disseminat-
ing child pornography, got two years
and was ordered to register as a sex
offender for twenty years. In August,
the court will determine if Richmond
must do the same.
When Richmond was convicted,
Madison told me, "he was so afraid he
melted in my arms like my seven- and
five-year-olds." Madison wiped tears
from his eyes as he recounted the expe-
rience. "He hugged me and cried on my
chest, like, Don't ever let me go. He said,
'Nobody's going to want me now. My
life is over.' "
When I met Richmond, he was liv-
ing on a locked floor above the Jefferson
County Courthouse, in Steubenville,
awaiting transfer to a state facility. Like
all the other young prisoners, he was
dressed in a green shirt and pants that
looked like hospital scrubs. He has a
boy's face, with a fine mustache just
starting to come in, set on the hulking
body of a grown man.
Contrary to what his father told me,
Richmond said that he had been inti-
mate with the girl from West Virginia.
"We were just touching each other and
kissing," when they first got to Mark
Cole's house, he said. "We were just rub-
bing on each other. I didn't . . . enter
her." Asked if he had violated a code by
fooling around with someone his friend
had been involved with, he shook his
head. "It doesn't work like that: commu-
nity property."
I asked Richmond why his friends
had testified against him. "They're not
my friends," he shot back. "They were
Trent's friends, and I was friends with
Trent. I thought he was cool. I didn't
know he was one of them guys that'd be
playing girls like that." Their accounts of
his behavior were untrue, he said."That's
a lie. All of it." This would mean that he
was about to go to jail for nothing, but
Richmond seemed calm. "It's fine," he
said. "Can't do much about it. I don't
want to hold a grudge."
The kids were all drunk that night,
"just wilding out," Richmond said. But
he didn't believe that the girl was un-
conscious. "She's remembering the stuff
she wants to remember. That's how I
see it." In his recollection, he was sitting
in Cole's kitchen, "eating his mom's
pizza," and when he went down to the
basement he saw Mays standing at the
head of the couch, "over on top of her,
playing with himself." I asked if he'd felt
unsettled when he saw his friend mas-
turbating on a passed-out girl. "No, I
was just, like, 'What are you doing?'
And he just smiled at me. I just said,
'I'm going to sleep, put your clothes
back on.' I wasn't really thinking about,
Oh, this is rape. I was just thinking, He
talked to her, so I don't really care what
they do." Richmond meant that Mays's
relationship with the girl, conducted
through their cell phones, somehow
made what was happening acceptable.
Looking at me incredulously, he ex-
plained it as if to a clueless parent:
"They were texting."
At the sentencing hearing, Richmond
crossed the courtroom to speak to
the victim's family. "I would like to apol-
ogize to you people," he said. "I had no
intentions to do anything like that." He
was sobbing so violently that a court
officer patted him on the back and en-
couraged him to finish his statement.
The officer told me that he later got
threatening phone calls and e-mails, at-
tacking him for showing compassion to
a rapist. "Basically what I said was, 'You
got to take a deep breath, and you got to
try and get through this, Ma'lik, because
what you have to say to these people is
going to mean a lot to them.' "
After the sentencing, CNN's Poppy
Harlow said on air that it was "incredi-
bly difficult, even for an outsider like
me, to watch what happened as these
two young men that had such promis-
ing futures, star football players, very
good students, literally watched as they
believed their life fell apart." Within
forty-eight hours, more than two hun-
dred thousand people had signed a pe-
tition on Change.org demanding that
CNN apologize for its "disgusting cov-
erage of the Steubenville Rapists."
For many people involved in the trial,
the tension and the enmity continued. A
few weeks later, two girls in Steubenville
were convicted of using social media to
threaten the victim with assault. Michael
Nodianos had started his freshman year at
Ohio State University when the video of
him was restored to YouTube. After his
course schedule was posted online, and a